You have samples that are eligible for re-sequencing

*By clicking above, you are requesting a re-sequencing of your eligible samples, confirming your eligibility for our patient assistance program, and agreeing to our Terms and Privacy Policy. A claim will be submitted to your health insurance upon re-sequencing.

uBiome clinical tests are fully or partially covered by most health insurance companies under "out-of-network" healthcare benefits, with a valid healthcare provider's order. We have patient assistance programs in place to assist eligible patients with the remaining patient responsibility.

What will the process look like?

1. Upon receipt of your request, we'll ensure that you have the most up to date version of our clinical tests, to date. If you don't, we'll first re-sequence your eligible samples to this version.

2. Around the end of Fall, you'll receive a notification when your newest report (including yeast!) is available.

Which uBiome product is right for you?

SmartGut

SmartJane

Explorer

Patients with chronic gut conditions such as IBD or IBS, or symptoms such as gas, bloating or diarrhea.

Patients with the desire to, alongside their healthcare provider, learn more about their own vaginal health and how to improve conditions, such as discharges or infections, through lifestyle or diet.

Health and wellness tool to help you better discover how diet and lifestyle affect your microbiome.

Doctor authorization required?

Yes

Yes

No

Where is it available?

US and Canada (other countries coming soon)

US and Canada (other countries coming soon)

203 countries and regions where online payments can be made with a credit card or PayPal

What is the price?

uBiome clinical tests are fully or partially covered by most health insurance companies under “out-of-network” healthcare benefits. We have patient assistance programs in place to assist eligible patients with the remaining patient responsibility.

uBiome clinical tests are fully or partially covered by most health insurance companies under “out-of-network” healthcare benefits. We have patient assistance programs in place to assist eligible patients with the remaining patient responsibility.

What do your intestines have in common with a sewer pipe?

The average individual pops out about an ounce a day for each 12 pounds of body weight, so do the math and this suggests you flush away almost twice your own weight each year.

Now, to you that’s just waste matter, but to the uBiome labs it’s our bread-and-butter.

I know. An unpleasant metaphor, but I hope you get my point.

Fortunately we need only the smallest sample of your poop to analyze your microbiome.

Just a Q-tip’s worth collected from your used toilet paper in fact.

So you have our blessing to carry on happily flushing the rest away.

However, while our laboratory is content to test your microbiome using mere smears, other researchers are getting down and dirty with the more prodigious volumes you and I dispatch into the void each day.

A current project, appropriately called Underworlds, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is experimenting with smart sewers that enable public health experts to study a city’s collective microbiome.

They can detect foodborne pathogens, enabling them to pick up localised outbreaks of food poisoning, and also look for biomarkers that flag up other diseases and health conditions.

The work is being done in conjunction with Kuwait, where officials are anxious to learn more about childhood obesity. More than a third of Kuwaiti children are obese.

But what does obesity have to do with sewage?

Surprisingly, quite a bit.

A remarkable University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study earlier this year analyzed bacteria from sewage collected in 71 cities in 31 U.S. states, and could predict whether it had been gathered from a community categorized as either lean or obese with close to 90% accuracy.

Lean and obese individuals typically have differing intestinal bacterial profiles (more of this, less of that etc.) and the study showed that this same differential was also reflected down in the sewers.

Sewage sleuthing has been a thing for some time.

European studies have studied the stuff in sewers to monitor population-level trends in illicit drug-use, showing for example that cocaine and ecstasy are big at the weekends in major metropoles, while cannabis and methamphetamine use is pretty constant throughout the week.

Impressive, huh? There’s clearly a lot to be discovered by looking into effluent.

And a lot to be grateful for, too, when you consider the sewage systems of developed countries.

In fact readers of the British Medical Journal voted sanitation the greatest medical advance since 1840, comfortably beating antibiotics, anesthesia, widespread vaccinations, and even the discovery of DNA.

Although we don’t have time to go into how sewage is processed, I couldn’t leave you without brief mention of a project in India, in which the job is done by allowing sewage to sit in pools of duckweed and fish for five days.

Apparently it does the job brilliantly, but somewhat uncomfortably the whole operation is then funded by selling the fish.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that you can rearrange the letters of the particular species they use to spell something else altogether.

Carp.

Have a great week!
Alexandra 🙂
—
Alexandra Carmichael
Director of Product, Community, and GrowthuBiome